Taking time to clean up June 3, 2011

In most cases, clutter doesn’t show up overnight. It slips into our homes in bits and pieces until suddenly we look around and are completely overwhelmed by the piles of stuff around us. At this point, it’s going to take a significant time investment to get things back in order.

So how did you get there? Is it because you didn’t make a significant time investment to keep things clean to begin with?

More likely, it’s that you didn’t make some very small time investments along the way. Now they’ve all been added together, and cleaning up will take longer. What are the small time investments that I’m talking about?

-Sorting the mail daily, as soon as you bring it into the house – trashing the junk, putting the bills in a central location, etc. On your average day, this takes about 2 minutes tops. A pile of a week or month’s worth of mail will take much longer to sort through, plus you run the risk of missed bills/invitations/notices.
-Putting things away after you purchase them. Do you have grocery clutter? Probably not, at least not the perishables. You come into the house and put those in the fridge immediately. Why don’t you do that when you purchase housewares, clothes, or other non-perishable items? Leaving these things in their shopping bags only allows the bags to pile up, you can’t find or remember what you purchased, and you end up re-purchasing because of it.
-When you get undressed, put the clothes you take off away immediately. Put them in the hamper or fold them up and put them in the appropriate drawer immediately rather than letting a pile of clothes grow on your floor.
-Take care of the dishes as you use them. Wash them after every meal or put them in the dishwasher right away instead of leaving them in the sink. A couple of freshly-used dishes are much more pleasant to deal with than a massive pile of day (or two) old ones.
-Throw things out when you’re done with them. When you finish your soda, put the can in the recycle bin right away. When you use a paper towel, put it right in the trash. Don’t leave garbage around your house with the plan of picking it up later. (And don’t leave leftovers in your fridge once you notice that they have passed their prime. Throw them out as soon as they’ve gone bad).
-If something is in the wrong place, put it away as soon as you notice it. Don’t leave that hanger on the floor of the closet or that pair of shoes in the hallway. Putting things in their proper location only takes a couple seconds.
-If you use something, put it away as soon as you are done. Put the scissors back in the drawer, put the hammer back in the toolbox, put the calculator back on your desk. This way you will know where the item is and not have to waste time looking for it later.

Each of these tasks takes up only seconds of your day, but they add up to a clutter-free existence and that means you’ll be far less likely to have to devote your time an energy to a big-scale cleanup down the line.

5 Tips: Take Time Friday to Make Monday More Bearable March 25, 2011

No one likes Mondays. For most of us, they’re only the beginning of the work week, and it seems like there are so many tasks and deadlines stretched out in front of us. While Mondays will probably always be a bit lame, you can make them less so by taking small steps before leaving the office on Friday.

Clean your desk
Walking in to see a messy desk will do nothing to improve your mood on Monday morning and will probably leave you feeling instantly overwhelmed. Take a few minutes on Friday afternoon to organize your work space. Catch up on your filing, trash papers you don’t need any more, throw out or wash empty coffee cups, toss the snack wrappers, and put your pens and supplies in their designated location. If you’re feeling really ambitious, grab some wipes or cleaning spray and actually clean the surface.

Check your calendar
Review your calendar for Monday and for the rest of the week. If you have any meetings scheduled for Monday (especially for Monday morning), prepare for them now. Get any paperwork or emails that you will need for the meeting together and make sure you know where the meeting room is. If you’re presenting or giving out handouts, print everything you will need on Friday so that you’re ready to go on Monday AM.

Take care of minor tasks
If your to-do list is littered with two-minute jobs, see how many you can peel through before the end of the day. Return quick phone calls, answer yes/no emails, restock supplies. Anything you can do in two minutes or less, get it done now.

Write a to-do list
The tasks and deadlines you have in front of you are probably more fresh in your mind during the Friday workday then they will be after the 2 day weekend. Write your Monday to-do list on Friday, and leave it on your desk so that you can quickly get your bearings when you come back in to the office. If your work is deadline-driven, you may want to write up a separate list of weekly deliverables by day so that you can plan your time accordingly.

Clean up your inbox
Hopefully, you’re on top of the contents of your inbox and cleaning/filing as you go. If it’s gotten away from you, Friday afternoon is a great time to catch up. Delete what you no longer need, file what needs to be filed, and reply to anything you can resolve quickly. Make sure that you’ve at least looked at anything marked urgent before letting it sit until the following week.

I make no promises that these tips will make your Mondays suddenly seem awesome, but they should at least make them a little less bad.

Paper, Paper, Everywhere (Part II) March 8, 2011

There are a ton of filing systems and products out there. Some are great and some are useless. The best filing system out there, however, is the one that makes sense to you and that you will maintain. If you don’t have the time or patience for an overly detailed system, or you’re trying to fit your life into someone else’s categories, your system just won’t work for you.
That being said, there are some general rules that pretty much everyone can use to help get started with filing your papers.

One, keep personal and business files separate. If you have a business, a charity, a committee that you chair, etc. keep the files related to that separate from your personal files. This includes receipts, tax documents, certifications, etc.

Two, documents you don’t access regularly don’t need to be accessible. There’s only so much room in your filing cabinet and you probably just don’t have the space for ten years of prior tax returns or the loan documentation from when you bought your house six years ago. Get a plastic tote or bankers’ box and get those papers out of your filing cabinet and into your attic, basement, or closet. You may need to keep them, but you don’t need to keep them particularly handy.

Ok, so now what?

(I’m going to focus on personal records here, because business files are a whole other animal.)

There are about a million things you can keep your files in, and what works best for you will depend on your space, budget, and the amount of paper you are looking to store. You can use a desktop file or magazine files or storage boxes, or even that old standby the filing cabinet. The important feature here is that whatever system you use allows you to keep files in separate categories – by drawer, by folder, etc.

Your personal files can be broken down into several broad categories – probably something like personal, school, work, home, vehicle, medical, taxes. You don’t have to use those specific categories. Go with what works for you.

Think of your filing system like an outline – each file is a main category with sub-categories in it. My filing cabinet is set up basically like this:

Family – one folder for each person in the family. Each one has their birth certificate, social security card, baptism/religious records, etc. (I realize this is a security no-no, but I don’t have a safe.) There’s also a folder in this section for the cat, which holds her medical records. If you have several pets, you might want to set up a separate file with folders for each of them.

Cars – one folder for each car we own, which holds the title, financing paperwork, and copies of the registration, along with the maintenance records. There’s also an “insurance” folder, with a copy of our insurance cards and our policy.

Home – one folder with our certificate of occupancy and deed, one for maintenance records, one for receipts and warranties for major purchases. If you rent, this is where your lease would go. Your homeowner’s or renter’s insurance information would also get a folder here.

Taxes – I have this broken into two folders. One is for last year’s return and the backup documentation, just for reference. There’s a separate folder for this year’s taxes, which holds documents I’ll need to file my return for 2011 – a folder for tax statements, one for charitable contribution receipts, one for medical expenses, etc. Keeping this information together and organized throughout the year makes tax time a bit less painful. It’s also helpful to have it all handy if you want to review your deductions or your tax situation at some point mid-year.

I also have a miscellaneous file at the front of the cabinet. Most organizers advise against this on the theory that everything will end up in this folder and that’s not much of a system at all. I think a miscellaneous file is OK for short term storage. For example, say you sign up for a six week course. You have an enrollment contract and receipt. You throw them in the miscellaneous file. When the class is done, the checks have cleared, and you don’t need the backup stuff anymore, toss it. Nothing should live in the miscellaneous file forever, but it’s a good place to store things you’ll only need a short time.

That’s pretty much it. (Well, there’s a little more to it, but a girl deserves some privacy!) It’s the simplest system possible. If you start getting involved with color-coding, lining up tabs, and things like that, you’ll just drive yourself nuts. You’ll never want to file anything because of all the maintenance involved. Keep your system simple, easy to maintain, and intuitive to you.

5 Tips: Paper, Paper, Everywhere! March 2, 2011

Tax season has a way of making us feel like we have an awful lot of paper in our lives. Cleaning it out can be intimidating, though – it’s hard to be certain what you should keep and what you should get rid of. Don’t let fear keep you from cleaning out your filing cabinet! Here are a few tips on sorting through your papers:

Keep important papers together and in a safe place
You probably have some papers that are particularly crucial – birth certificates, passports, social security cards, wills, immigration papers, etc. If you have a safe in your house, these papers should be in it. If not, they should be in a secure location – even if it’s just a separate folder in your filing cabinet or a certain box on your shelf. You should know where these papers are and be able to access them as needed.

Ask yourself if you really need a hard copy
Most companies that have online bill payment services will give you the option of receiving your statements via email rather than regular mail. This will cut down on the amount of paper coming in to your house, and also provides easy access to old statements should you need to reference them. Your bank may have a similar option if you do your banking online.

Don’t hold onto it longer than you need to
This bit can be tricky, but there are a few papers you can confidently discard. If you pay your bills online, you can trash your paper statements once you pay the bill. You will be able to access prior statements online if you need them. You can discard bank statements once you have verified them against your own records (if you need to). You can retrieve older bank statements online or at the bank if you need them. If your employer offers online access to your pay stubs, you don’t need to hold on to those hard copies, either. Generally, you don’t need to hold on to your pay stub once you’ve cashed the check or the direct deposit has posted to your bank account. (I know, you can use them to verify your W-2. I also know that no one has ever actually done this, and if there was really a question you could get your payment records from your employer).

Box up things you don’t need to access regularly
There’s only so much room in your filing box/cabinet/folders. There are some papers that you may want to hold on to long term – your original mortgage documents, prior year taxes, old report cards, college transcripts, military records, etc. However, these generally aren’t papers that you will need to reference on a regular basis. Storage or Bankers’ boxes are a great solution. As long as your basement or attic is relatively dry, you can store these papers long term away from your more frequently-referenced items. This will free up space and leave you feeling much less cluttered.

Get rid of what you will not ever need
There’s no reason to hold on to manuals, receipts, and warranty information for items you do not own. Likewise, you do not need to hold on to expired policy documents, insurance cards, or identification, especially once you have the current documents to replace them with. If you can access the information or a copy of a statement online, you can pitch the hard copy.

Hopefully these tips helped you purge at least some of the papers in your home, and will get you ready for the next post – organizing what’s left.